Increasingly, consumers engage in health information seeking via the Internet. Taking a communication perspective, this review argues why public health professionals should be concerned about the topic, considers potential benefits, synthesizes quality concerns, identifies criteria for evaluating online health information and critiques the literature. More than 70 000 websites disseminate health information; in excess of 50 million people seek health information online, with likely consequences for the health care system. The Internet offers widespread access to health information, and the advantages of interactivity, information tailoring and anonymity. However, access is inequitable and use is hindered further by navigational challenges due to numerous design features (e.g. disorganization, technical language and lack of permanence). Increasingly, critics question the quality of online health information; limited research indicates that much is inaccurate. Meager information-evaluation skills add to consumers' vulnerability, and reinforce the need for quality standards and widespread criteria for evaluating health information. Extant literature can be characterized as speculative, comprised of basic 'how to' presentations, with little empirical research. Future research needs to address the Internet as part of the larger health communication system and take advantage of incorporating extant communication concepts. Not only should research focus on the 'net-gap' and information quality, it also should address the inherently communicative and transactional quality of Internet use. Both interpersonal and mass communication concepts open avenues for investigation and understanding the influence of the Internet on health beliefs and behaviors, health care, medical outcomes, and the health care system.

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Consumer health information seeking on the Internet: the state of the art

A meta search system accepts natural language queries which are parsed to extract relevant content, this relevant content being formed into queries suitable for each of a selected number of search engines and being transmitted thereto. The results from the search engines are received and examined and a selected number of the information sources represented therein are obtained. These obtained information sources are then examined to rank their relevance to the extracted relevant content and the portions of interest in each of these ranked information sources are determined. The determined portions are output to the user in ranked order, having first been processed to clean up the portions to include valid formatting and complete paragraphs and/or sentences.

Natural language meta-search system and method

The United States National Library of Medicine's (NLM) MEDLINE database is the largest and most widely used medical bibliographic database. MEDLINE is manually indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary. Using MeSH, a searcher can potentially create powerful and unambiguous MEDLINE queries. This article reviews the structure and use of MeSH, directed toward the nonexpert, and outlines how MeSH may help resolve a number of common difficulties encountered when searching MEDLINE. The increasing importance of the MEDLINE database as an information resource and the trend toward individuals performing their own bibliographic searches makes it crucial that health care professionals become familiar with MeSH.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/articlepdf/369515/jama_271_14_038.pdf

Understanding and using the medical subject headings (MeSH) vocabulary to perform literature searches.

Search engines are essential for finding information on the World Wide Web. We conducted a study to see how effective eight search engines are. Expert searchers sought information on the Web for users who had legitimate needs for information, and these users assessed the relevance of the information retrieved. We calculated traditional information retrieval measures of recall and precision at varying numbers of retrieved documents and used these as the bases for statistical comparisons of retrieval effectiveness among the eight search engines. We also calculated the likelihood that a document retrieved by one search engine was retrieved by other search engines as well.

Finding information on the World Wide Web: the retrieval effectiveness of search engines

Five search engines, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, and Lycos, are compared for precision on the first 20 results returned for 15 queries, adding weight for ranking effectiveness. All searching was done from January 31 to March 12, 1997. In the study, steps are taken to ensure that bias has not unduly influenced the evaluation. Friedmann’s randomized block design is used to perform multiple comparisons for significance. Analysis shows that Alta Vista, Excite and Infoseek are the top three services, with their relative rank changing depending on how one operationally defines the concept of relevance. Correspondence analysis shows that Lycos performed better on short, unstructured queries, whereas HotBot performed better on structured queries.

First 20 precision among World Wide Web search services (search engines)

An analysis of Internet search engines: assessment of over 200 search queries

Faculty Views of Open Web Resource Use by College Students

Nurses and other health professionals have recognized the exponential increase in published nursing, medical, scientific, and allied health literature. The Internet is adding more information to that expanse. Information specialists and librarians have noted that although a virtually limitless range of health information is present on the Internet's discussion lists, file transfer protocol, telnet, gopher, and World Wide Web sites, computer users are just beginning to use the "information super-highway." This article describes the uses of the Internet while providing practical information addressing questions of connecting to the network and searching its most useful features.

Accessing nursing resources on the Internet.

This paper describes a study that attempted to ascertain the degree of success that undergraduates and graduate students, with varying levels of experience using the World Wide Web and Web search engines, and without librarian instruction or intervention, had in locating relevant material on specific topics furnished by the investigators. Because different search engines use dissimilar search protocols and interfaces, potential problems paralleling those perceived in CD-ROM and online searching were of concern. Results of the study demonstrate that most end-users can effectively use at least two search engines without professional assistance. The reasons for the contrast in end-users' success with World Wide Web search engines compared with problems found in other types of database searching appear to be related to the effectiveness of WWW search engines' software, which can quickly scan a large number of documents and weight the retrieval for relevance. While online database and CD-ROM vendors have made proprietary search syntaxes standard, Web search engines generally provide for natural language searching. The success of users' searches is no longer necessarily contingent on a knowledge of search protocols but rather on the ability to identify correctly the key concepts for which they are searching. (Contains 30 references). (Author/SWC) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** Web Search Engines: Key to Locating Information for All Users or Only the Cognoscenti?

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Nicholas G. Tomaiuolo

Papers

An analysis of Internet search engines: assessment of over 200 search queries

Faculty Views of Open Web Resource Use by College Students

Accessing nursing resources on the Internet.

Web Search Engines: Key To Locating Information for All Users or Only the Cognoscenti?.

Are Metasearches Better Searches